Add chapter support

[dagwieers]

Some video content includes chapters, this allows the user to jump directly to another offset in the video. In Kodi the Up and Down arrows are used to jump from one chapter to the next or previous chapter.

It would be nice if we could implement chapters in Kodi.

[dagwieers]

The metadata for video content looks like this:

{
...
    "chapters": [
        {
            "startTime": 56,
            "title": "Lerarentekort",
            "id": "8a5ad532-cf67-4e62-b5e7-43af03d4b93d",
            "externalImageUrl": null,
            "duration": "00:10:57",
            "thumbnail": ".thumb.319.319.png",
            "formattedStartTime": "00:00:56",
            "startTimeInMillis": 56353
        },
        {
            "startTime": 713,
            "title": "Sociaal Incapabele Michiel",
            "id": "76303240-6ff4-4ef3-9f2b-c1e7ce1e8438",
            "externalImageUrl": null,
            "duration": "00:05:04",
            "thumbnail": ".thumb.319.319.png",
            "formattedStartTime": "00:11:53",
            "startTimeInMillis": 713485
        },
        {
            "startTime": 1017,
            "title": "De aangever van Alex Agnew",
            "id": "3ab0cb0d-facb-463a-b75b-bbc761b3ad74",
            "externalImageUrl": null,
            "duration": "00:01:27",
            "thumbnail": ".thumb.319.319.png",
            "formattedStartTime": "00:16:57",
            "startTimeInMillis": 1017987
        },
...
    ],
...
    "programName": "de-ideale-wereld",
...
    "shortDescription": "Met Alex Agnew",
...
    "title": "Alex Agnew",
}

[dagwieers]

It appears that this is not possible to add this to video content. The implementation in Kodi only supports chapter-markers already present in video files, so it cannot be added currently to a video stream.

Ideally the Kodi python interface supports a method ListItem.setChapters():

    listitem.setChapters([
        dict(starttime=56, label='Lerarentekort', thumb='https://foo.bar/thumbnail/some_thumb.png'),
        dict(starttime=713, label='Sociaal Incapabele Michiel', thumb='https://foo.bar/thumbnail/another_thumb2.png'),
    ])

[dagwieers]

So in Kodi 19 (Matrix) we have chapter support for streams, but currently the python-interface to make use of this from a python add-on is missing.

I opened a feature request upstream at https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=347080

[dagwieers]

The chapter support was backported to Leia in xbmc/xbmc#16977